When we think about consciousness, it is hard to understand how such inner awareness could emerge from the collection of neurons we call the brain.
Although the brain surely helps create consciousness, looking for sentience (the experience of awareness) in neurons may be analyzing matters at the wrong level. We experience conscious awareness, including its emotions, urges, thoughts, and plans, at a psychological level -- such inner awareness may define the psychological level, in fact.
Is it of any more use to look for consciousness in the brain than it is to look for wetness in either hydrogen or oxygen before they combine to form water?
I surely cannot answer what consciousness is, but I believe there may be some clues to its nature in the Great Transformation (Axial age) (1000 BCE to 200 BCE). It seems at least possible, for example, that consciousness as we know it today -- aware, personal, and self-reflective -- may not have been fully formed until that era.
In his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes makes a number of claims as to the evolution of consciousness that are radical, imaginative, and insightful. If you want to dismiss them go ahead, but first listen to the philosopher Daniel Dennett who argues that to understand consciousness we will have to stretch our imagination -- a great deal:
Speculation is guided largely by plausibility, and plausibility is a function of our knowledge, but also of our bad habits, misconceptions, and bits of ignorance, so when you make a mistake it tends to be huge and embarrassing. That's the price you pay in playing this game. Some people have no taste for this, but we really can't do without it.
Surely among Julian Jaynes's most notorious (and central) arguments is that before about 800 BCE people attributed voices in their heads to gods and others, rather than being able to attribute them to their own minds, as we commonly do today. Jaynes interprets the Greek epic the Iliad (among other works) in this way. In the following passage on that epic poem, Jaynes describes one way of regarding the Greek gods Apollo and Athene, and their relations to the (human) warriors Hector and Achilles. Jaynes argues:
The gods are what we now call hallucinations. Usually they are only seen and heard by the particular heroes they are speaking to. Sometimes they come in mists or out of the gray sea or a river, or from the sky, suggesting visual auras preceding them. But at other times, they simply occur. Usually they come as themselves, commonly as mere voices, but sometimes as other people closely related to the hero.
Apollo's relation to Hector is particularly interesting in this regard. In Book 16, Apollo comes to Hector as his maternal uncle; then in Book 17 as one of his allied leaders; and then later in the same book as his dearest friend from abroad. The dénoument of the whole epic comes when it is Athene who, after telling Achilles to kill Hector, then comes to Hector as his dearest brother, Deïphobus. Trusting in him as his second, Hector challenges Achilles, demands of Deïphobus another spear, and turns to find nothing there. We would say he has had an hallucination. So has Achilles. The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did.
Now Jaynes may or may not have been correct about his reading of the Iliad, but scholars agree that the people of the Iliad exhibit little sense of self-reflection or psychological identity -- such qualities of awareness appear regularly only in writings after that era.
So I wonder as I did last week what might have brought about this change in awareness. Jaynes suggests a convergence of effects from the biopsychological to the psychological to the cultural. Among the biopsychological reasons Jaynes proposes is that the brain had evolved. Jayne's evidence points to the idea that human brains already were issuing spontaneous inner speech related to a person's activities; now, crucually, humans evolved a capacity to better recognize the voices as coming from within themselves. Those who possessed such new mental skills were better adapted to the environment and prevailed; they were our ancestors.
Jaynes outlined other influences as well: the spread of literacy and new techniques invented by Axial peoples for discussing inner feelings and thoughts. Each of these changes combined to create the post-Transformation (post-Axial) sense of conscious awareness. If something like what Jaynes described did occur, then our inner consciousness is a combination of the hardware of the brain, the software of the mind, and the cultural transmission of the idea of consciousness.
Notes:
In an earlier draft of this post, a quote from Turkle was included from pp. 149-150 of Dennett's book. Dennet's own remarks on speculation are from p. 150, both of Dennett, D. (1986). Julian Jaynes's software archeology. Canadian Psychology / Psychologie Canadienne, 27, 149 -154.
The quote concerning the Iliad is from pp. 74-75 of Jaynes, J. (1976). The origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Jaynes' list of reasons for the change in consciousness are summarized in a 7-point list on page 221.
This post was abridged and edited for clarity five days after posting.
Copyright (c) 2009 John D. Mayer
